The living room PC is a certified thing now, and not just for those of us with extra long HDMI cables. The Steam Machine is “out” for the dozens of people who’ve picked up the $1,000 cube, but before that, folks were already making their own living room machines that run SteamOS.
Anyone can make a Steam Machine, which is exactly how Valve likes it. That’s one reason it priced its GabeCube roughly at cost (which has skyrocketed thanks to the AI-driven memory crisis), and why it has no interest in making games exclusively for its Linux-based devices.
“We want it to still be viable for other hardware manufacturers to offer things like the Steam Machine either with higher performance or a different feature set,” Valve engineer Yazan Aldehayyat recently told Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier in an interview.
Valve is capable of selling its hardware at a loss to boost its adoption, but its goal is to grow the PC platform as a whole by maintaining an open spirit.